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Study Finds a Quarter of Bosses Hoped RTO Would Make Employees Quit (theregister.com) 76

Posted by BeauHD from the behind-the-screens dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A study claims to have proof of what some have suspected: return to office mandates are just back-channel layoffs and post-COVID work culture is making everyone miserable. HR software biz BambooHR surveyed more than 1,500 employees, a third of whom work in HR. The findings suggest the return to office movement has been a poorly-executed failure, but one particular figure stands out -- a quarter of executives and a fifth of HR professionals hoped RTO mandates would result in staff leaving. While that statistic essentially admits the quiet part out loud, there was some merit to that belief. People did quit when RTO mandates were enforced at many of the largest companies, but it wasn't enough, the study reports.

More than a third (37 percent) of respondents in leadership roles believed their employers had undertaken layoffs in the past 12 months as a result of too few people quitting in protest of RTO mandates, the study found. Nearly the same number thought their management wanted employees back in the office to monitor them more closely. The end result has been the growth of a different office culture, one that's even more performative, suspicious, and divisive than before the COVID pandemic, the study concludes. According to the report, most employees working remotely and in-person both feel the need to demonstrate productivity, which for more than a third of employees means being seen socializing and moving around the office. That intense need to be visible may actually be harming productivity, study author and BambooHR's own head of HR Anita Grantham concluded in her findings. A full 42 percent of employees who responded to the Bamboo survey said they show up solely to be seen by bosses and managers. If bosses think their presence in the office is making any difference to the amount of work getting done, the results indicate that's not the case.

Remote employees and in-office employees both report spending around two hours of every day not working. Those in-office ones, of course, are probably spending those ten hours a week looking as busy as possible. Away from the office, employees feel the need to demonstrate presence by being hyper-available and never going offline -- the so-called "green status effect," the data suggests. "The distrusting and performative cultures some companies are cultivating are harmful to bottom-line growth," Grantham said, adding that RTO policies are okay, but not if they don't consider individual employee needs. "The conversation around work modes is one of the most important things to address and get clear on as a business," Grantham said. "It often gets reduced to just RTO, but it's actually a much bigger conversation."

Study Finds a Quarter of Bosses Hoped RTO Would Make Employees Quit More | Reply

Study Finds a Quarter of Bosses Hoped RTO Would Make Employees Quit

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  • Makes me want to quit (Score:5, Informative)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Monday June 10, 2024 @11:35PM (#64539861) Homepage Journal

    All these dupes on Slashdot.

  • Leaders need an external thing to blame failure on (Score:3)

    by will4 ( 7250692 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @12:03AM (#64539897)

    Corporate leaders need an external force to blame failure and poor performance on. "Given the recession, sales were better than expected, down 1% with earnings down 0.5%"

    Corporate leaders also need an external narrative to divert attention from lackluster performance: "And for the 743rd time in the quarterly earnings call, we're using AI"

  • Retired (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Greymane ( 949969 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @12:11AM (#64539911)
    I personally retired, rather than return to the office. I was planing to wait another 6 months. I had moved to a low cost area to work from home during COVID, but the cost of finding a new apartment back in Boston was the deal breaker. I retired as soon as I turned 62 and qualified for a full pension.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by sid crimson ( 46823 )

      Wowza...
      I live in Los Angeles and, according to Google, the average rent is $2,105 per month. Now, Los Angeles is pretty large geographically speaking, and there are some super high rents and some very low rents... each representing places you'd want to, or not want to, live. This is 39% higher than the national average rent price of $1,518/month. Also according to Google, the average rent for an apartment in Boston is $3,842.

      • There are a couple important questions about those prices. One, are those prices for just the municipality of Boston, or for the entire metro area? Two, are the prices per person or per apartment? Especially in a couple of the neighboring cities, apartments tend to be 2-4 bedrooms, so you have a bunch of unmarried people in their 20s living with a couple roommates and each paying $1200/month for rent. Those people also tend to be engineers and biologists making $100k/year, so $1200/month is easily affordabl

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          are those prices for just the municipality of Boston, or for the entire metro area?

          Or for the portion of the metro area served by adequate mass transit?

    • Re:Retired (Score:4)

      by sid crimson ( 46823 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @12:20AM (#64539927)

      P.S. Congratulations on your retirement. :-)

  • Quit with the dupes, already!

  • And corporates loves money and dislike responsibility.

    Easiest way to reduce your workforce is to make them miserable. They walk, you don't have to pay them anything.

    • And corporates loves money and dislike responsibility.

      Easiest way to reduce your workforce is to make them miserable. They walk, you don't have to pay them anything.

      You should probably take a closer look at where Right to Work laws are in place. Also known as Right to Fire. Or Right to Quit.

      They make firing someone as cheap and easy as not liking the color shoes they wore to work that day. Literally.

    • After a while, doesn't your place of work change? If you're WFH for a few years your lifestyle adjusts and asking you to return to office is a change, one that should be easy to argue is unreasonable.

      I think it would be more redundancy rather than quitting if your employer behaves that way.

      Enforcing office presenteeism is massively reducing scope to hiring talent. Is it just telling subordinates that "they're vigorously hiring, but unable to find anyone, so pull your socks up, it'll get better". In effect,

  • And why should I care? If an acronym is going to be used in an article (or even an excerpt) then please, for the love of god, tell us what it stands for.

  • That's a questionable strategy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Casandro ( 751346 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @01:41AM (#64539985)

    I mean typically, if you want to fire people, you want to fire the less productive ones and keep the more productive. Trying to make your employees quit essentially means that those employees who can find a new job quickly will quit first. Essentially you are lowering the productivity of your work force.

    • Re:That's a questionable strategy (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @02:13AM (#64540005) Homepage Journal

      I mean typically, if you want to fire people, you want to fire the less productive ones and keep the more productive. Trying to make your employees quit essentially means that those employees who can find a new job quickly will quit first. Essentially you are lowering the productivity of your work force.

      The thing is, that's also what happens when you do layoffs. Even if you get rid of only the least productive employees, the impact on morale still tends to be significant, and that tends to result in a second round of departures that consist mostly of the people with the most mobility, who are usually the ones you most want to keep. There's really no good strategy for dealing with a situation where you have over-hired other than imposing a hiring freeze (and sticking to it) and then allowing attrition to naturally reduce headcount over time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tom ( 822 )

      Yes, but when's the last time that you saw "productivity" as a KPI for a top-level manager?

      No, headcount matters, revenue matters, customer numbers matter, stock price matters. Productivity? Pfft. Where are you living? In the 20th century or something?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 )
      Many bosses suffer ostrich syndrome. If they dont see you, you arent working. They dont usually see them actually working. Usually they are seen socializing. Smokers are a big example. Legally you are allotted one 10min break every 4 hrs. Yet smokers often take 1-2 breaks per hour. Statistically they are less productive due spending 15-20% of their time on the smoking area. Their reward for wasting 15% of their time in unauthorized breaks is often being seen as productive by others due to the high visibilit

    • At big corporations there is no such thing as "more productive" people or any such similar concept.

      You are a box on an org chart and a number in a spreadsheet. Nothing more. You are not important. No one is.

      If you want to be valued as at a company you have 2 choices: start your own company or be a top performer at a startup. Otherwise you're nobody.

      • Depends on the corporation doesn't it zippy.

        How are you anything other than a number on a spreadsheet running your own company or working at a startup. If you run your own company, you tend to not exist because you underpay yourself and overwork yourself. If you work for a startup, you are hoping management will reward your effort.

        So no, running your own company or working for a startup does not guarantee you will be valued.
  • When you worsen conditions to make people quit you first lose the most skilled workers: the people with options and friends in other companies, who respect themselves too much to allow it and know what they're worth. You're left with the people who lack the motivation to look for other work, the people who other companies have turned down, and the people who don't really care even enough to actively look for other work. You may as well arbitrarily lay off a percentage of your best workers.
    • For sure. The summary says that 75% of managers didn't want their employees to quit with Return To Office. They just wanted their employees back in the office so things could go back to the 2019 normal.

      • 2019 normal is gone. Forever.

      • For sure. The summary says that 75% of managers didn't want their employees to quit with Return To Office. They just wanted their employees back in the office so things could go back to the 2019 normal.

        2019 normal? Are you sure that’s the reason?

        Are you sure it couldn’t possibly be the thousands of overpriced middle-earth-management cube farmers desperate to justify their entire corporate existence again by forcing a planet to give any Go-Green initiative the middle in favor of pushing millions of tailpipes to start polluting like 2019 again, all in order to justify the equally overpriced dirt that happens to be priced at “commercial” rates that need to be corruptly sustained with

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Njovich ( 553857 )

      In a company where they have to start firing a significant portion of the workforce because of shit performance of the business, the best people are going to walk anyway. Only difference between them quitting and you firing them is the severance payment.

  • Some companies have perfected the art of the dick move - making work suck to force some employees to quit instead of paying severance.

    Yahoo and IBM examples of companies that have both done it. The problem with that strategy is that all the people with in-demand, transferable skills will quit and the company is left with the deadwood and lifers who'll cling to their jobs like limpets no matter what BS the company throws their way. So yes in the short term, it cuts head count, but those heads that remain are

    • The problem with that strategy is that all the people with in-demand, transferable skills will quit and the company is left with the deadwood and lifers who'll cling to their jobs like limpets no matter what BS the company throws their way. So yes in the short term, it cuts head count, but those heads that remain are not necessarily the heads the company wanted to retain.

      A self-inflicted tale as old as Capitalism itself. At this point, what is there to say to Greed N. Arrogance losing valued talent involuntarily? I’m gonna go with fuck ‘em if they never learn. Sounds about right. Hell, if retention was their job they would have been fired so long ago the dot-bomb wouldnt have dropped.

      • The only reason why it isn't the same thing in socialism is that you have no other employer to which to move. So, you end up with "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" culture.

    • The other problem is people see this coming, so they idle and don't focus on their work or side projects and lose enthusiasm.

      Also, I think unless you're in R&D companies don't care about your creativity much, you're just part of a work queue that's mechanical to them, easy to find another chef to work on the tickets. Unless the requirement is non-remote and mostly within a 80km radius.

  • I have been assured by TOP MEN that this was the case.

  • All talk and no action. At least in the aggregate. It means there was always room to impose hybrid or full RTO.

    • All talk and no action. At least in the aggregate. It means there was always room to impose hybrid or full RTO.

      And on the flip side of that argument, RDP enabled room for hybrid or WFH 20+ years and eleventy gazillion metric fucktons of pointless commute tailpipe pollution ago. We still have middle-earth-management cube farmers in 2024 instead.

      We should all enjoy the crippling hypocrisy as we RTO to find the first in person meeting, discussing how the company can be more “green”.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by evilcoop ( 65814 )

        Unless there is a govt regulation mandating remote work to save on carbon emissions, why should an employer care? Even if there is a carbon tax on gasoline, that is another cost for the employee to bear. In the absence, employers will do what is best for them. Which is mostly to have everyone in a couple of days a week minimum, in their view.

  • The article misses the point about why these companies, particularly tech companies, needed to reduce their workforce. These companies grew explosively after the financial crisis of 2008 when two things were true: money was very cheap to borrow, and labour was really cheap. That's why you end up with companies like Uber exploding because it can only exist in an environment like that... they borrowed money to expand really quickly, relied on below minimum wage labour, and literally said the "quiet part out

  • We've always known this. The company swings from "everything needs to work at home!" to "everyone within 50 miles of an office needs to be in the office!" (and then they change to 25 miles, 20 miles...). And then back to work from home, and then back to the office. I've lost count of how many times they've changed the rules.

    It is just an attempt to shed the workers who don't want to change, without having to pay severance or make up some other excuse to fire them.

  • No shit Sherlock (Score:3)

    by crmarvin42 ( 652893 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @11:33AM (#64540873)
    Anyone surprised by this, wasnâ(TM)t paying attention.

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